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Tag Archives: ethics

In case you didn’t hear, the FBI announced on Monday that it is dropping its lawsuit that sought to force Apple to help it unlock the iPhone 5C of one of the San Bernardino, Calif., terrorists. In withdrawing the suit, the feds said they found a way to get into the phone without needing Apple to devise a way to hack its own products.

So, yay?

The Justice Department originally sought Apple’s cooperation based on a 1789 law that it said gave the government the authority to compel a private company to assist with the investigation. Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly turned down the government’s request. The vacating of the order lets Apple off the hook, meaning the tech company doesn’t have to engineer a backdoor into its iPhones that, Cook argued, would open a door that could never be closed again.

In that respect, the end of the court case is good news. The thought that a company could be ordered by the government to create a security flaw in its own products is a chilling one. Keep in mind, too, that it’s not just governments who want to gain access to the smartphones of private individuals (though that is a scary thought all by itself). So do hackers, criminals and other people with less savory motivations than making the world safe for freedom and democracy.

But the end of the court case has some serious drawbacks for American consumers and anyone concerned about privacy at all:

The government could ask for a tech company’s help again

A court ruling in the FBI vs. Apple case, either way, would have set a precedent for how the feds ask for this kind of cooperation in the future. Now there’s no precedent, so there’s nothing to guide either side when this issue comes up next time. And of course there will be a next time.

The amount of privacy that U.S. citizens should expect is unclear

A seemingly unbreakable privacy setting on the iPhone has now been broken — allegedly. Does this mean that Americans should assume their phones can be hacked by the FBI at any time? Is this a power the feds will only use in extreme circumstances? (I readily concede the San Bernardino shootings count as extreme circumstances.) This question could have been litigated in open court. Instead it remains unanswered and will remain so, since the FBI won’t talk about how it broke into the shooter’s phone.

How the government can break through security firewalls is unknown

One question that Apple still has for the government is: How did you do it? In the courts, they (and we) could have gotten an answer. Now that the case has been withdrawn, the FBI won’t say how it finally broke into the iPhone, let alone whether or not it found worthwhile information.

At least Apple didn’t have to make its iPhones vulnerable to hacking, that the Justice Department still had to do the dirty work. But that’s a small comfort when we now know that there’s no such thing as foolproof privacy protection.

Then again, maybe there never was. That raises the ultimate question: How much privacy are you willing to trade for convenience?

It’s a question that, no matter what would happens next in this debate, probably won’t find an answer in federal court.

It turns out if you tweet something funny, other people are not allowed to steal from you. And vice versa.

I don’t understand the plagiarist mindset, but at least you can imagine a pathetic, high-pressure desperation from the Jayson Blairs and Jonah Lehrers of the world. They could at least say the deadlines and the paychecks made them do it. But stealing someone’s joke on Twitter and tweeting it as your own is just plain lazy.

What, couldn’t they just retweet and give credit where it’s due?

I get that writing jokes is difficult. I spent several years attempting the craft with a sketch comedy troupe in my late 20s. Suffice it to say It went so well I got into journalism shortly thereafter.

Many, many people become famous on the Internet despite having nothing original to say. Many people remain obscure despite having lots to say. Twitter’s new stance won’t magnify the voice of those in the latter group, but at least it gives us one more way to thin the herd of the former.

The reporting tool could lead to abuse, as The Verge points out. You don’t have to own the copyright on a tweet to report it. But this tool is a step in the right direction.

Meanwhile, if you want to be funny on Twitter, write your own damn jokes.

I just wish Facebook would crack down on those annoying “These are the 20 greatest nonjokes in history. #11 is gold” listicles.

The critically acclaimed show’s first season hit Netflix on Friday and has earned praise for its gritty, dark (often literally dark) portrayal of Daredevil, a blind vigilante superhero who fights crime in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York. We are supposed to root for Matt Murdock, the lawyer-turned-superhero, for all the right reasons: He’s blind; he’s a defense lawyer who only takes innocent clients; he fights bad guys.

Then, in the blink of an eye — or rather a slash near the eye — Murdock cedes the moral high ground. He has a bad guy chained to a water tower on the roof of a building and needs to find out from said bad guy where a kidnapped boy is held. Questioning gets him nowhere, of course. With the help of a nurse at his side (I’ll get into that in a bit), he find out the prime place to cut the bad guy to cause the most pain. After that, and a threat to throw him off the roof, the bad guy tells Murdock what he needs to know.

The lesson here, which contradicts reality, is that torture works. It’s a lesson we saw in “24,” in “Zero Dark Thirty” and even “Harry Potter”: Good guys can use torture to get what they want.

It’s a shame that the political atmosphere of the Bush years provided ambiguity to a subject that used to be crystal-clear: Torture is wrong. Once our government endorsed methods that would previously have warranted war-crimes charges, pop culture followed suit. Along came Jack Bauer and the repeating “ticking time bomb” scenario that made torture not only necessary, but justified.

“Daredevil” opted for the same cheap ploy, only this time the ticking time bomb was a missing kid.

A few minutes before this disturbing scene, the nurse – who heals Murdock’s wounds in her apartment – asks him how she can be sure she’s on the right side. After all, he beats people up and dragged an unconcsious man to the roof of a building, chaining him to a water tower. Murdock’s response is, essentially, that he’s one of the good guys.

His interrogation of the bad guy in the next scene undercuts (sorry) his entire case.

For a long time, heroes in literature fought evil without becoming evil themselves. Apparently today’s writers have abandoned this notion. Even Harry Potter tortured and brainwashed people to get to Voldemort and faced no consequences.

It seems reasonable, though, to expect a 30-year-old educated lawyer to make better moral choices than a 17-year-old kid.

Drones are everywhere in the news, but they have nothing to do with gathering the news. Not yet, anyway. That could change if the Federal Aviation Administration changes the rules to allow commercial use.

That hasn’t stopped journalists talking about the reporting possibilities of remote-controlled aircraft. On Monday, while at a conference on the news industry, I had the pleasure of attending a workshop on drone technology, the not-yet-legal tool that could improve the way we gather news.

You can read my Twitter recap below. What do you think of the promise and perils of drone reporting? Discuss in the comments, email me or talk about it on Twitter at @AdamRichterRE.

Of course, no drone discussion is valid without video. So here you go: